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Continuous Flow





What Is Continuous Flow?

Continuous flow is a Lean method that allows you to move a single product through every step of your process instead of grouping work items into batches. The method is called this way because it allows you to continuously send goods to market. This provides you with the opportunity to deliver value more often to your customers.





What Is Takt Time?

In order to make the most of continuous flow, you need to define a takt time for your assignments.


Briefly explained, your takt time is your sell rate.

For example, if your company has a takt time of 2 days, then you need to finish producing a product every 2 days because on average a customer is buying your product every 2 days.

You can calculate takt time by dividing the total available time for production by the required units of production.


Learn more about Takt Time

What Is Heijunka?

To help you optimize your workflow continuously for takt time, Lean offers a solution for production leveling called Heijunka.


Heijunka allows you to produce intermediate goods at a steady rate so that you can satisfy fluctuations according to your average customer demand. For that purpose the method has two ways of leveling production:

  1. Leveling by volume
  2. Leveling by type

Leveling by volume



So if you receive 10 orders per week on average but their number is fluctuating by the day (e.g. Monday 5; Tuesday 1; Wednesday 2, etc.), you just need to adjust your capacity to meet the average demand. In a continuous flow, this would mean producing 2 products per day (in case of a 5-day work week) to meet demand.

Leveling by type

When you are producing a portfolio of products and distributing capacity according to demand, things can be quite tricky. Facing this issue, Toyota found a way to ensure a steady workflow that meets customers’ demand by implementing a Heijunka box.

Heijunka_boxHeijunka box

Basically, it is a system that visualizes the demand for each product and according to the average demand it levels a production sequence for achieving an optimal flow.

Learn more about Heijunka

What Is Jidoka?

Meeting demand is important, delivering a product with an unquestionable value is even more so. This is where Jidoka comes in. It is a method for ensuring a built-in quality of a product. Also known as “autonomation”, Jidoka allows you to stop the production process as soon as you see an imperfection.

It has 4 distinctive steps:

  1. Discover an abnormality
  2. Stop the production process
  3. Fix the immediate problem
  4. Investigate and correct root cause

Although it may temporarily disturb the continuous flow of your process, implementing Jidoka will help you ensure that the product you are delivering meets the quality expectations of your customers.

Learn more about Jidoka

Continuous flow is an important part of Lean management and Lean product development in particular. By optimizing your work process in order to deliver the right value at the right time to your customers, you will be more likely to ensure their loyalty and grow your business.

Organize Work, Keep Track of Projects

And Optimize Your Workflow.


Step 1

What is Takt Time and How to Define It?

Learn all there is to know about what Takt time is, how to define it and how...

Step 2

What is Heijunka?


Step 3

What is Jidoka?
